A frame of image can be represented by a matrix of points referred to as pixels. Each pixel has one or more attributes representing the color associated with the pixel. Video streams are represented by consecutive frames of images. To efficiently store or transport image and video information, it is necessary to use data compression technologies to compress the data representing the attributes of each pixel of each frame of the images.
Various standards have been developed for representing image or video information in compressed formats, which includes Digital Video (DV) formats, MPEG2 or MPEG4 formats from Moving Picture Expert Group, ITU standards (e.g., H.261 or H.263) from International Telecommunication Union, JPEG formats from Joint Photographic Expert Group, and others.
Many standard formats (e.g., DV, MPEG2 or MPEG4, H.261 or H.263) use block based transform coding techniques. For example, 8×8 two-dimensional blocks of pixels are transformed into frequency domain using Forward Discrete Cosine Transformation (FDCT). The transformed coefficients are further quantized and coded using zero run length encoding and variable length encoding.
Zero run length encoding is a technique for converting a list of elements into an equivalent string of run-level pairs, where each non-zero element (level) in the list is associated with a zero run value (run) which represents the number of consecutive elements of zero immediately preceding the corresponding non-zero element in the list. After zero run length encoding, strings of zeros in the list are represented by zero run values associated with non-zero elements. For example, the non-zero elements and their associated zero run values can be interleaved into a new list to represent the original list of elements with strings of zeros.
Variable length coding is a coding technique often used for lossless data compressing. Codes of shorter lengths (e.g., Huffman codewords) are assigned to frequently occurring fixed-length data (or symbols) to achieve data compression. Variable length encoding is widely used in compression video data.
After the Forward Discrete Cosine Transformation and quantization, the frequency coefficients are typically reordered in a zigzag order so that the zero coefficients are grouped together in a list of coefficients, which can be more effectively encoded using a zero run length encoding technique. The energy of a block of pixels representing a block of image is typically concentrated in the lower frequency area. When the coefficients are reordered in a zigzag order, the coefficients for the lower frequencies are located relatively before those for higher frequencies in the reordered list of coefficients. Thus, non-zero coefficients are more likely to concentrate in the front portion of the reordered coefficient list; and zero coefficients are more likely to concentrate in the end portion of the reordered list.
Since compressing images is a computational intensive operation, it is desireable to have highly efficient methods and apparatuses to perform run length encoding and variable length encoding.